NVIDIA Driver Version 196.75 Recalled!

NVIDIA has issued a recall for the driver version 196.75 released earlier this week (March 2nd) due to reported problems causing the GPU fan to stop working, causing the GPU to run without cooling and eventually burn out.

Activision Blizzard first made note of the problem when its support division began receiving complaints about malfunctioning and overheating video cards. Beta testers for their upcoming game Starcraft II also made note of the issue reporting lower frame rates and game play issues. Blizzard issued this statement to all their players:

“We’re getting reports where users are getting intermittent low FPS after installing these drivers. It seems that it is related to the fan control included in these drivers not working correctly and is causing the video card to overheat on 3D applications. This will affect Warcraft 3, World of Warcraft and StarCraft 2 Beta. Please uninstall the drivers and revert back to the older ones.”

NVIDIA has since pulled the driver from their website, rolling back to the previous stable 196.21 WHQL certified driver and have requested that users downgrade to the 196.21 version of the driver.

“We are aware that some customers have reported fan speed issues with the latest 196.75 WHQL drivers on NVIDIA.com. Until we can verify and root cause this issue, we recommend that customers stay with, or return to 196.21 WHQL drivers. Release 196.75 drivers have been temporarily removed from our Web site in the meantime.”

It is recommended that if you have done a driver update recently that you check if you are running version 196.75 of the and to immediately roll back to an earlier stable version of the driver, even if you haven’t noticed any issues, until NVIDIA has resolved the failure report. Please contact NVIDIA to report graphics card failures, as it is a driver issue and not a game issue.

If you are looking for the rollback version of the driver you can find them below:

I am a professional software developer working for Pythian as a technical lead. I am currently working on distributed systems. In the past I specialized in system monitoring tools and best practices. I graduated from Carleton University with a bachelor of computer science and minor in mathematics. My hobbies include augmented reality, artificial intelligence and system design.